


trick mirror

by arbitrarily



Category: Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French
Genre: Canon-Typical Content, F/M, Future Fic, Infidelity, POV First Person, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Elements, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-12 23:47:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21484825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Rob comes home.
Relationships: Cassie Maddox/Rob Ryan
Comments: 14
Kudos: 46
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	trick mirror

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ninety6tears](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninety6tears/gifts).

> Happy Holidays and a very Happy Yuletide!

“You love Knocknaree, right, Jonathan? You love being part of a community where you’ve lived since you were a tiny kid? Adam might have felt the same way, if he’d got the chance. But now he’s out there somewhere, could be anywhere in the world, and he can’t ever come home.”  
_  
In the Woods_, TANA FRENCH

By the time I finally spoke to Cassie at Dublin Castle I had already seen her twice that week. The first time was at the market, the top of her head ducked down as she considered a pack of frozen chicken breasts. I watched her from a distance and waited for the inevitable—for her to disappear. A woman with a buggy crowded by two wailing children passed between us and once they were clear, Cassie with the frozen chicken was gone.

The second time was in my flat.

This was the same month that it happened again. The thing, if pressed, I might admit I had spent my entire life waiting for. _It came back_. I thought it without understanding, the first thing in my head before I had even fully processed the headline—  THREE CHILDREN MISSING, KNOCKNAREE. The news I had waited my entire adult life to read.

Knocknaree had kept itself out of the headlines for a good while then. Even Katy Devlin faded, save for the occasional retrospective—a _where are they now?_ for unsolved kiddy murders. I might have expected it, but it didn't stop the queasy drop in my gut.  A cold dread inched through me as I read the news story on my mobile. They found one shoe, covered in blood. There was a photograph of it embedded in the story. The shoe looked so small, there on the news site. In my hand, on my phone screen. O’Kelly must be in tatters, evidence like that making its way to the press. I scrolled down and continued to read, waiting for my name to drop into the story alongside Peter’s and Jamie’s. And sure enough, the final paragraph, there I was. There they were. I inhaled and scrolled back up to the photograph. My shoes must have been that size when they found me.

At the midpoint of the article—above the photograph of the shoe and below the photograph of the wood, or what remained of it—was a trio of school photos. Three boys, all in a line. The one in the middle was missing a front tooth and grinning wide and proud. My hand was clammy around the shell of my mobile and had begun to tremble.

It wasn’t more than three days later when they found the bodies. Two children, dead by the motorway. The third was still missing. The boy in the middle. That was when I got the call.

Ten years passed since Operation Vestal. Time was nonnegotiable and it marched on. Maybe I had anticipated ruin, after everything. Operation Vestal and Rosalind. Cassie. But I was a survivor. There was a longer fuse for both disaster and myself and I would continue to burn without detonation.

Some things happened in a life that served as a cleaver, come straight down to chop time in half, neatly demarcated. Before and after. Before Operation Vestal, After. That was how it was, for me. For Cassie. Maybe she was only cleaved in half once, but I had already been cut before she met me. When I was still Adam, a boy, lost in the woods. No, not lost—never that. The problem, I would say if I had either the nerve or the voice, was that I was found. 

It took me a long time to understand that. I know it now. 

Ten years, but I pulled myself back up and back together, off Harcourt Street. Not Murder, never that again, and fair play to O’Kelly for keeping his mouth shut. I knew better than to consider it a personal favor rather than his pride refusing to let it be known to any but IA he had had Adam Ryan on his squad working the Knocknaree case and hadn’t known a blessed thing about it. So I remained Rob Ryan and I found my way back in, pariah that I was. 

After—extensive, mind-numbing—work in the float pool I wound up in White Collar. I landed there. I had the look and the accent for it. People looked at me and assumed I knew money and I knew the things that people (the posh, specifically) would do to keep what wasn’t theirs.

You developed an appetite in this line of work. You learned your own capacity for cruelty, brutality. How to break a man in the name of justice. It wasn’t fed the same when the crime, the revenge sought, was bloodless. White Collar had that muted sort of violence. The things people were willing to do to each other, steal and destroy, all came from the quiet, impersonal remove of numbers on a screen or fraud, deception. “No one was getting hurt.” I heard that little ditty more times than I care to recall. Bollocks. 

Someone was always getting hurt.

I want you to know, those ten years were mostly normal for me. I don’t want you to think this is the ravings of some nutter, confessing just how exactly and when, precisely, he lost the plot. It wasn’t like that for me. 

It’s just—

Sometimes I woke to the sound of laughter. Nothing warm or inviting to be found in it, overloud, a banshee’s shriek, pressed close and personal to my ear. Enough to make me jolt, limbs spastic beneath the sheets. Each time this happened to me—and I could count on one hand how many times; two hands, if I crave honesty—I woke alone. Dingy early morning light and my empty bed. Me, unbalanced. Uncertain which side of the divide that laughter belonged to—sleeping or waking.

Real or not real.

After they found the bodies, I was called in to talk with the two Murder detectives working the case. They gave me their names and I forgot them just as quick. I had never encountered either in their come up through the ranks in uniform, or if I had, their anonymity had persevered. After Cassie, I quit knowing people, at least on the job. I came in, I punched my ticket. I did my job, and occasionally I did well. I did good. I got my man. I made right on some deficit tallied against me. 

The detectives, a male and a female, and I felt as if I had stepped on a trapdoor of history and been transported to the wrong side of ten years ago, were polite with me. “We just wanted to connect with the two who worked Knocknaree in ’06,” the male said. They wanted to know if there was possibly any connection between that case and this one. I first thought of Cassie’s disapproving face, that wry mockery of hers, both marred suddenly by blood, deep and gouged wounds, before I even thought of Rosalind. Cassie had taken on a different, darker tone in my memory. Sure, if I dug there was still that girl I met first and then loved second, the woman who became everything to me. The one who turned cartwheels in the cold sand and was quick with a cut-up and ate like a trash compactor and even with everything she had seen in both this job and in her life, she kept a brightness, a buoyancy, to her. I remembered disapproval instead. Loss. Why wouldn’t I.

“Doubtful,” I said, and I meant it. 

The female detective leaned forward, her dark eyebrows furrowed in irritated disbelief. “You might’ve closed that case but there was a particular loose end that managed to slip free. You can be that sure this isn’t history on repeat?”

I didn’t think she could possibly mean the same loose end I first thought of (myself, it was me, I was the thread that stitched ’84 to ’06), but I still shifted uncomfortably in my chair. I fixed her with what my White Collar partner called my pissy Wall Street face. “What do you want me to say? I fucking bungled it? Made a right mess of it? The girl walked because of me?” I had never said that sentence out loud, not even to Cassie. I wanted to swallow it back, return to my dull life of mundane monotony and the rich with their tax havens and the aspirational with their pyramid schemes. If you tried it, you could forget the person you once were. I had near succeeded at it once, and I had been trying very hard at it for the last decade.

“No one’s pointing any fingers here, mate.” So the ginge was playing good cop to his partner’s domme with a whip bad. She wasn’t my type—too severe, too cold. I liked my women inviting, open and girlish and warm. Again, Cassie’s face found me, but as I saw her last. Disappointed in me.

The detectives asked me about her, and of course they did.

“Haven’t seen her since the op.” That was true, at least. Technically. 

The pair of them exchanged a glance I lacked the emotional fluency to interpret. Hit me with that pang again, of loss, regret. The desire to go back in time if not to fix anything then just to experience it one last time. To know again, at least for a little, what it felt like to belong to another person. 

Two years with her had not been nearly long enough. I never found that rhythm with any other person. Maybe that was the beauty of it: you had if only but for a little while and then you would spend the rest of your life trying to recapture it. 

“It’s gonna be hopeless, lads.” I couldn’t tell you why I said it, but I did. They shared the same uncomfortable look of surprise on both of their faces. These two, I could tell, they were from the city proper. They didn’t know what those woods were like. They didn’t know how much it took, that its hunger was bottomless, and even when you thought that it was through, it would keep gnawing at you. “Best of luck.”

When I came out of the interview room, she was there. Waiting as patiently as Cassie ever did anything—which was to say not at all. She was bowed over her mobile and she had not seen me yet. I had time. Her hair was stark and dark against the empty wall behind her and she was as trim and petite as I recalled her body pressed against my own. As it traveled around and parallel and in opposition to me. To be someone’s partner was to be in their orbit, they in yours, and I had missed her gravity. 

Even with her chin tucked and her eyes cast down, I could see that her face was still very much so hers. Mine. I had kept it with me all these years. I carried it, and that made it my own. 

And now you have my truth, I suppose. Operation Vestal did leave its mark on me. It hurt me. It hollowed out a wound inside of me, and when I look to it, when I touch it, the only thing I find there is her.

“Cassie,” I said. She looked up.

I started seeing her this past year. Cassie. Not only her, but Peter, Jamie. They came to me both as they would be now, grown and adult, and not as children. I couldn’t rightly say how I knew it was them, but it was the same sensation as the icy chill that raced down your spine and an old mam would say someone must’ve stepped over your grave. It was a brush of such absolute wrongness it caught me by the throat each time. Jamie’s hair was still pale and I could remember it sliding silkily across my scraped knuckles, my fingers pulling at it just to make her shriek and kick at me. I knew it was her the same way I knew I would never be able to reach her, not across the busy intersection, not through the mob of pedestrians. Not before she was gone again. 

I ran into Peter at the bank. It was Peter, I was certain of it. Twelve o’clock lunch hour and it was winter then, that first time I saw him, and the entire city was coated in gritty grime and dirty slush. His shoulder collided with the center of my chest as I exited and he entered. My heart seized up, a stutter shock pause to my step, and all he did was nod at me. I made the sidewalk traffic part around me. I stood there, stock still, my hands shaking, before I made an abrupt decision. I went back into the bank, and sure enough, there he was, his back to me. I grabbed him by the arm, and—

“Hey, I didn’t mean nothing by it, wasn’t watching where I was going is all. Jaysus.” He wasn’t Peter at all.

“You’re really here.” I said it without meaning to, and Cassie’s face creased into a frown. 

“Yeah, hi. I wanted to help, if I could. They called me,” she added unnecessarily. It made me sad that age had only made Cassie more opaque, less open. Still and immovable. I didn’t once think that maybe she was only that way with me, guarded and hunted and on the prowl alike. I wanted to know what she saw when she looked at me. 

“Yeah. Same.”

Neither of us said anything more, waiting the other out. I had imagined meeting her again and again, over and over. If I was sentimental and if I was romantic about anything, it was this and it was her. I would lay in bed and tease out different scenarios, the two of us thrown back together again, the past something that could be stitched up and mended and survived. Made right. She would come to me, she would wait on my front stoop for me to let her in. Sometimes she would already be inside my flat and I would feel the compression on the mattress as her weight settled beside me. It was real enough, so real, that when I opened my eyes to emptiness, to loneliness, it felt like an actual insult. An affront. 

We were not supposed to meet again, not here. Not like this. Not in Dublin Castle, the scene of the fucking crime as it were. But then, how much a fool had I been? This was the only place we could come back together.

No—there was one more place I could think of.

I never returned to Knocknaree, not until a day before the detectives called me in. I drove out there after I saw the news. I couldn’t get the image of that lone trainer, drenched in blood, dried into a dark rust brown, out of my head. 

The motorway in Knocknaree was finished ages ago. It hadn’t taken it all. It cut through where Katy Devlin had been found, the altar long gone, the tree line pushed further back, but the wood was still there. It all looked different, but too much the same. The landscape altered and not as I remembered it. Nothing worse than returning to the past only to find it different. You grafted what you remembered over top of it until the view shimmered. A magic eye puzzle. You’re looking for the wolf but all you can see are the trees. It felt like I’d taken a wrong step and now existed somewhere outside of time and instead inside of memory. 

I hadn’t felt that way in a long time, but my car stopped on the motorway’s bend, scant traffic rushing past me, I saw it. The motorway was too close to it. That was my other thought. The secret that still beat, trapped inside there, all that hidden gloom. I carried that same beat inside of me, even if I didn’t have a name for it.

I managed to convince Cassie to come out and get a drink with me. “For old times,” I said, and when I smiled I felt as if I had stroked out, acquired a palsy some time in the last ten minutes. My mouth would not cooperate with me—it felt watery and outside my command. 

Her face had gone skeptical but not disinclined. “You think that’s a good idea?”

“You think I’ve started adopting those? Your faith in me, Cass. I’m flattered.”

A flicker passed over her face, and for just a moment, it was as if the record had skipped. We had found the cheat, and we were back at the start. Easy and punchy, our smart mouths aligned and belonged only to each other. Her face fell back into that stoic, impenetrable countenance. She was looking at me the same way she would look at a suspect, like she had me in the box, and that was what was wrong here—that was only one of many things wrong between us.

Cassie sighed, a heavy weight-of-the-world and well-burdened thing. “Yeah, sure. Why not.” She got to her feet. She had to look up to find my face, and god, I’d missed her. She had to have missed me too. “Your shout.”

The pub we went to was a newer one. A younger crowd, unfrequented by anyone who might have known us now or ten years past. I glanced around as she snagged us a high-top table. Much like Knocknaree I had lost a sense of the landscape in this city. 

“You still married?” I barreled out of the gate, our pints still fresh, with that. I never met a wound I wouldn’t take a handful of salt to. Usually they were my own. Maybe, even with the years between us, I wanted to believe hers were still mine.

“I am.”

“You happy?”

Her face went severe, her mouth thin. Forbidding. “Don’t. Don’t talk at me like we’re,” and she cut herself off. I hated a thought of a Cassie careful with her words (with me) and I cut myself off there, too.

“Kids?”

Talking to her was like staring into a mirage. I kept seeing the shimmer of her as I had known her best, the actual her breaking through in all the small movements and gestures I had failed to remember. Had never known. There was a slight fidget to her fingers (all bare despite her claim of marriage), the raised jut of her chin in constant challenge. Her face had gotten older, but beneath the crow’s feet and the faint lines that had cropped up around her mouth (she must’ve kept smoking, much like myself), she was still Cassie. There was hurt there, at the question, and I found myself annoyed. I used to know where all her landmines sat.

“No,” she finally said. I didn’t have a follow-up question. I knew that at some point in the last decade her and Sam had left Dublin, left the squad. I didn’t ask her now where she went. Call me coward, call me worse—I did not want to know. 

She didn’t ask after me. All for the best. I’ll tell you instead. I had tried marriage, for a time. Like most aspects of my life, I was found wanting.

I also have to tell you—I saw Rosalind. Even she came to me. 

I took a woman home. This was months ago, back in the spring. She was short and perky and unmemorable and utterly boring except in the sack. I rolled over in the night and I blinked, confused. I was met by a cascade of thick, long hair and a long delicate neck bared to me. I didn’t recall either feature about the woman, but then I had hardly been on alert, hardly thinking, as she sat astride me. I knew, the same way I knew it was Jame and I knew it was Peter, that this was not the same woman. 

I sat up in bed, and I peered down at her face. I reared back, nauseous and afraid. Rosalind, all of seventeen years old, her mouth parted in a canary-eating grin even as she slept. I felt ill, violently. 

I stumbled out of bed, clumsy with fear, the noxious kind that lives bilious and thick in your throat. When I was at the bedroom door, my back to her, I heard her speak. “I had a dream about you,” she said. 

I raced to the bathroom and I locked the door. It sounds ridiculous now, silly, put into words like this. But I remember the fear, I remember her, as clear as fucking day. I sat there, on the lip of the tub, and I could not catch my breath. I could not quiet the inhuman terror that had awakened inside of me. 

When I worked up the nerve to leave my own bathroom, the woman in my bed was the same woman I had taken home. Her hair was short as was her neck and she was as much a stranger as the woman I had fucked before her and the next woman I would fuck after. Rosalind was not here. She never had been. She was gone. 

My fear never quieted. Abated, maybe, but it began to mutate each time it rolled back in, a tide thick with toxic waste. I will tell you what I feared the most. I feared, more than anything, that it was only a matter of time before I crashed into myself. It sounds mental, I know it, but the fear was real enough. When I gave myself over to it, I worried that in the intervening years, Knocknaree marked as a signpost in the passage of time and my futility, I had lost myself. I did not look for myself, but I feared it all the same: what if I could be found. What if Adam Ryan was waiting for me.

We drank too much, Cassie and I, and of course we did. If there was one shared tradition between ourselves we were both still capable of honoring, why not that. 

The drink—first beer, then whiskey—made it easier to talk. I told her about my White Collar work, the broad strokes of it, notable cases but only the funny ones. I did not tell her about my flat and I did not tell her I went back to Knocknaree. I did not ask her if she had been to my local market in the last week and not once did I mention Sam’s name. She treated me the same in kind. She had left police altogether, she told me. Psychology, that was her field now, but then it had always been her field. I told her that and her mouth cracked into one of those grins of hers, wide and mischievous. 

“Doing time with a right mess like you might as well’ve been my internship, yeah?” 

My laugh cut through the pub. Cassie laughed too, softer, as if surprised by it. 

“It’s good to see you.” It was the most honest thing I had said in days. Months, even. Fuck, the last ten years. It was easy to lose touch with it—honesty. I reached for it, and my glass was empty. Again. 

“Rob,” Cassie started, and there was that sigh again. 

“No.” I waved my hands. I leaned forward against the table. “It’s, I have to say it. You have to let me say it.” Her face was sharp, like an animal’s, and it said to me she did not have to let me do anything. That she was, that look said, something I did not deserve. I plunged on. “I think about you all the time. I think—Cassie, it’s you. All the fucking time.” That hadn’t been entirely what I meant to say and it did not feel good to confess it. It felt instead as if I had reached into my own body and pulled out a bone or a vital organ and proffered it to her, proud and ashamed, like a dog leaving a kill at the backdoor. 

Cassie’s face now was sad, pitying, and that wasn’t what I wanted. We were once so attuned to each other, our moods and our wants. I knew there was no way I could reach across the table and ruffle her hair, not the way we used to, and in that small movement all could be if not forgiven then pardoned and forgotten, same as I wanted to believe all sins could be.

“That’s not fair,” she said quietly. She lifted her head. “I don’t like thinking about you, Rob.” That hurt me, and I hated that. Hated that I probably more than deserved it. I wished I could hate her the same way, but I knew that was a lost cause. Instead, I focused on what she had not said: she did not say she did not think about me, too. 

She drew a finger down the condensation on her near-empty glass. “Do you know what I first thought of you? When I met you? Fuck, when I saw you?”

I didn’t want to know; it was the only thing I wanted. “What?”

“What a fucking prat. Who does he think he is?”

I didn’t say anything. I thought about flagging the bartender down, demanding another round. I looked up and then quickly away. I had forgotten what her eyes felt like when trained on me. “Who did you think I was?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think I was interested in knowing you. Not until later.”

I couldn’t fight the bubble of disappointment that swelled within me. I had thought this could be a repeat, that evening we first spent together, the one neither of us could remember without any kind of clarity or detail. I wanted it natural. I wanted to slip into her again like a warm bath. A knife into butter. A knife. I wanted to be the knife. Fuck the metaphors, I wanted to be inside of her again. It was easy, so easy, to make this about fucking—and believe you me, I have, bitterly recalling her with the tenacity and dedication of a maladapted internet troll—but it was more than that. When you knew someone, to truly know them as I once knew Cassie, you lived inside each other. Like nesting dolls, her in me and me in her. I wanted that again. I wanted to belong to someone else, effortlessly and in total. I spent the last decade of my life mourning something I could never get back. But then, that was nothing knew for me. I had been mourning since they found me. Since they brought me out of the wood. I can tell you now the sort of man who gets made from that kind of grief. He is half-formed. He is always wanting. You cannot make him whole.

Believe me. I have tried. 

I looked up at her again. In the low light of the pub, she wasn’t entirely Cassie to me. I felt that familiar swoop of terror in my gut. Why should she be Cassie. Time had come and slipped between us only to expand, push us apart. Gave me a sense of unease, how difficult I found it to be myself with her. Like I was sat with a changeling and not the woman I had known and loved. Like maybe it was me who was the changeling. 

“Was any of it real?” I heard myself ask her.

“What?” Cassie sounded near offended. Good.

“You and me, back then, was any of that real?”

“Why wouldn’t it have been.”

“I’m asking if we actually knew each other.” What I really wanted to ask was, is it possible for two people to ever really know each other? Know each other as we thought we did? Trust was a slippery thing for me to put my arms around. I had been betrayed, by something greater than myself, greater than her. I was left with uncertainty and doubt, like a jagged piece of glass beneath my skin.

“What are you trying to make me admit, Rob?” She said my name like an accusation. She had a bit more steel to her now than when I knew her. Everything that had burned hot and electric in her had gone colder, icy and all the more intimidating for it. Like I couldn’t keep my balance, not while trying to travel across her.

“It was real,” she finally said. “It was as real as anything else.”

“Would it still be real if we were different people?”

“What?”

I was drunk, I will freely admit that, and I leaned into it. An idea, a thought, was developing in the dark corner of my mind. If we could never have back what we once had, why not try for something else instead? 

If the past really was a bruise that hurt too much for us to lean on, if it was too much for Cassie and Rob, then why not be someone else. 

So much of our partnership, our friendship, had been predicated on our ability to pretend with anyone but ourselves. Opposite a suspect sat across from us, the handcuffs at the ready. Against O’Kelly or Quigley or even Sam. I was so naive then, I never once considered that maybe the act extended between the both of us. It felt so natural, so unearned, I should have known better. People can fall together like that, certainly they can, but I never once had the sense to distrust it. That maybe both Cassie and I made ourselves fit sometimes, sanded the edges down and pretended discomfort was nothing. Maybe I only saw that after we slept together and after she became someone I didn’t know how to reach without hurting myself in the process. 

Why not continue the tradition now.

“What if I wasn’t me, I wasn’t Rob. And what if you weren’t you,” I said. “I never met Lexie,” I added after a moment. Cassie’s face lit up, both with intrigue and something darker. A long pause pressed between us. She pursed her lips, mouth tight. She polished off the rest of her drink and set it down. She swiped at her mouth with the back of her hand and it was a small gesture but it was crystalline and perfect in my memory. How many times had I seen her do that? How many times did I chide her for her manners, call her a child when it was chocolate milk she drank or rolled my eyes as she finished her fourth coffee of the morning. Laughed when it was foam from her beer. 

I needed her to be her, but not.  The desire to start over was seductive and gorgeous and perfect as we cradled it between us, like every other secret we once shared. We could become people untethered from the ones who had to return to this place.

“If that’s what you want. Adam.”

I had never heard her address me as that. A part of me wished we could go back in time, erase this from the record. I was wrong. I wanted to still be Rob to her. Rob, and nothing more. Adam was someone else even if he was very much so myself. Adam had never belonged to her, not the way Rob did. Now, she had both.

Maybe this was a mistake.

I did not take her home; I was too afraid. Instead, like any other illicit affair, I got us a hotel room. We rode the lift up in mutual silence, both of us in opposite corners. As if we had already said everything we had to say to each other. As if Adam and Lexie had nothing to say to one another, not when they knew that anything they were to each other was only temporary. 

I was too drunk to be any good at this, I realized, as my mouth smeared over hers. Even then, I prayed I’d keep the taste of her. That tomorrow, when, inevitably, she would be gone I would still know her, have her, if only on my tongue, my lips. Cassie was more aggressive than me, like maybe this could be a reckoning between us. Her body still fit into mine, and mine into hers, the cliched lock and key. That scar still snaked along her ribs, fainter now than when she had first showed me, but still angry-looking against her pale skin. 

I remembered the last time with her as a tender thing, something to be preserved and kept safe. The opposite of everything I did once I left the warmth of her bed. Now, this was aching and sad and desperate, panicked, in a way I had felt for too long to quantify. As I pressed into her, as her back arched and everything about her was needy and grasping and hungry, I wanted to tell her everything. That each night I slept I returned to the wood. That the wood had never left me. I carried it with me, the same as I carried her, and it was all so heavy. It was all too much. I was lonely and I was frightened and the past kept trying to find me and it was getting closer, so close. Instead I held her close. I kept my mouth on hers, on the bend of her jaw and the cut of her shoulder, the stark bones of her clavicle that leapt as he chest heaved, and I wanted her to carry me, too. 

I had been left behind. That was what I might tell her. I was afraid. I was seeing things, and I knew I had done this to myself. I invited them in. I wanted them all back so bad. I wanted her back. 

Here is what I could say: I am haunted by everyone who ever left me.

Here is what I was too afraid to ask her: are you really here?

Despite everything said here, I try not to think about the things that frighten me. I don’t consider this to be a confession, but rather a sensible thing that has kept me moderately sane. I do not dwell on fear.

I worry this has been careless of me.

I have told you how I saw Jamie. Peter. Rosalind. I told you how they came to find me and disappeared just as quickly.

Cassie came to me, too. I told you that. Now I will tell you the rest. 

Cassie was in my flat. It was late and I was kissing her. I did not question her presence; I had her back and everything was going to be mine again. That was what I told myself. I touched her hip, I reached my hand beneath her shirt, and I felt her skin. Flat and soft and tender, even as I reached up higher, towards the band of her bra. I found her skin unmarked—no scar. I pushed her away from her. There wasn’t any scar.

“Who are you?”

She didn’t answer me. Now that I had seen her, I knew—her mouth was wrong. Everything about her was askew just enough for me to question not only her, but myself. As if in recognition of this very thought, the corners of her lips curled upward.

I remembered the stories Cassie—my Cassie, not this woman, not this stranger I had let into my home and into my arms—would tell me about Undercover. About being Lexie. How she slipped into her, like a second skin. “It’s supposed to be harder, I think. To become someone else.” She shrugged. “Was as easy as waking up.” Her mouth was stained with the red wine we had shared and I didn’t think I wanted to kiss her then but in my memory I did. One night wasn’t enough for what I felt for her and I found each time I cradled the past, careful in my hands, same as you cupped a bit of water, well-aware it dripped through your fingers, I wanted to kiss her. I remembered her not as I thought of her at the time—my partner, my best friend, capable and whip-smart and obnoxious and bratty and mouthy and right and perfect—but as I wanted to see her now.

The next morning the night before felt unreal enough to be dismissed as nothing more than a bad dream. I was hitting the bottle too hard, I was muddying what was real and what should be feared. I went into the kitchen and I drank straight from the orange juice carton, the taste tart enough to break through the sour hangover set on my tongue. I glanced towards my front door, and I froze. I walked over, each step heavy with unease, my earlier determination gone as I came closer. 

Where I had pushed her out the night before (not Cassie, she wasn’t Cassie, she wasn’t real, “What are _you_?” I had asked as I shoved at her shoulder), dead leaves and dirt had collected along the bottom frame of the door. 

My worry now? What if she never left.

I parked my car on the shoulder of the motorway. I leaned against the side of my dirty ride. There was little traffic to justify all the damage done to install this strip of road. It was quiet here. 

There is very little that I knew. I can admit that now. There are parts of this world that do not want to be known, even if they know you. Cassie should be long gone, well on her way back to the life she’s led in the space without me. Before she left though, she asked me, “Do you think anyone will find him?” I didn’t have an answer for her. I wasn’t thinking of the kid then, but of myself. I thought that I would continue on as I had for the last ten years. I would think of her. I would imagine her here. I would miss her without admitting that simple truth to myself and instead create her, mold her, deeper into myself. A part of me. The part I leaned against, the part I sought when loneliness reached, cold and familiar, for me. 

There was a rush of noise as cars approached, around the bend of the motorway. I looked out on the wood as they passed and turned back to my car, my hand still against the door handle. I knew one thing for certain: not everything in life was a trap, but not everything could you escape. 

It all came back. I’d like to tell you a story where everyone lives and everyone gets away clean and a life lived is a good life by virtue of the fact it can continue, it can be lived and not ended, but I cannot. You cannot move forward, not when the past nips at your heels, constantly demanding your return. Not when you heed it.

The birdsong stopped, the descent into silence abrupt. Even the breeze stilled. The cold was something solid that surrounded me and a chill crept over me. I was not alone. I knew that, too. I wasn’t ready, but I turned around. I looked behind me. All I saw was myself. 


End file.
